I nod. ‘Of course. But it’s as I said.’

‘Stories are purer at their source,’ she says, finishing my phrasing for me.

‘Just so.’

She nods. Her solemn face grows a little more so. ‘I have never seen a devil as forbidding as the one that stood on the Contemplation that day.’ She pauses, and shakes her head. ‘But the first time it tried to strike Adelynn down, she caught its sword on her own.’

I have seen plenty of devils in my time, but her words send a chill through me regardless.

‘That must have been an incredible sight.’

Sister Evangeline nods. ‘It was beautiful,’ she says.

‘What happened next?’ I ask her.

Sister Evangeline’s hand falls away from the sword hilt. ‘The greater daemon struck again,’ she says. ‘And Adelynn fell.’

The grief in her melodious voice is barely audible, unless you know what you’re listening for. Unless you recognise it, like I do.

‘She is what you meant on the chancel,’ I say. ‘Adelynn was the everything that you lost.’

Sister Evangeline’s mouth sets in a thin line. ‘Death is a gift,’ she says. ‘It is not something to be mourned.’

‘And yet you do.’

Another silence falls between us, broken only by the drumming of the rain and the sound of distant bells. Sister Evangeline exhales slowly, her breath misting in the cold air.

‘Adelynn believed in me when nobody else would,’ she says. ‘She took me in when others refused to, risking her own honour to do so. She raised me. Trained me. Stood beside me as a Sister, though I am not noble-born, or schola-raised.’

‘She must have seen something in you.’

Sister Evangeline frowns. It pulls at her scars. ‘She always said so. My Sisters say it is humility. Honesty.’

‘And you?’ I ask her. ‘What do you see?’

Sister Evangeline’s frown deepens. ‘What I have always seen when I look at myself.’

‘And what is that?’

‘Something incomplete,’ she says. ‘Unfinished, like a blade awaiting the fires.’

‘And yet you survived the Contemplation.’

Sister Evangeline looks at me. ‘I was spared.’

She says the words softly. Levelly. Just like before, the grief in her voice is almost inaudible.

‘But you wish you hadn’t been,’ I say.

Sister Evangeline’s hazel eyes turn fierce amongst those bright white scars. ‘This conversation is finished,’ she says flatly.

She turns and walks away from me, the wind snatching at her cloak, and I see the truth of her, then. Not the armour, or the mark, but the woman beneath it all. One who had found her place and her family only to have it all taken from her.

‘You feel as though you failed,’ I say, before she can leave.

She stops. ‘You know nothing of it,’ she says.

I think of Hellebore. Of Sofika, and that damned machine.

‘I do,’ I tell her. ‘You’re not the only one to have failed. To have lost their everything.’